if your female character doesn’t look like she has lived the life she leads and you can’t get a sense for her actual personality by looking at her because you’re too focused on making her pretty and perfect and palatable it’s bad character design and you should feel bad
It’s worth noting that, generally speaking – this is why concept artists want to be concept artists. They want to convey feelings, story and inspire the imagination. It’s not uncommon for concept artists to do staggering amounts of research in order to find ways to convey a type of character in a type of time period.
So, if you come across a product created by a major studio where they have extensive executive and production staff – it’s safe to say that any aggressively boring female character designs are done at the behest of a particular type of individual pushing a ridiculous myth to try to seem like a genius.
It is important to call out this kind of absurdity, not just to try to reduce the amount of gratuitous objectification in media – but to also spare these poor artists the indignity of having a guy try to convince them he invented anime tiddy.
– wincenworks
Also to note, some creators try to “justify” their boring, pandering designs. Character design should speak for itself. You shouldn’t need someone there to explain it, unless there’s worldly lore the viewer needs to know (like family crests, or magic stuff, etc).
Does the character look nothing like a sniper, while the creator insists that she is? Probably a bad design. Is the character’s backstory strangely convoluted, while also not impacting the character at all besides making an excuse for her to look hot? Probably a bad design. Is the character wearing clothes anachronistic with the setting, just to look hot? Definitely a bad design, unless she sneaked in some stockings from a parallel future universe. (Looking at you, Witcher 1.)
Personally I am one hundred percent supportive of orcs being allowed to feel pretty whenever they want. I don’t understand the final panel, surely it should be full of celebration!
While the sexy Hawkeye and Manfire blogs are largely archival (and marked NSFW, because Tumblr is a hellsite) these days, there’s always @magicmeatmarch every year 🙂
So remember the outcry that somehow a zoom in shot of Rainbow Mika (R. Mika)’s butt slap was so critical to the game that it’s remove was an act of vile censorship? Well we now have the official word from the Street Fighter team on what led to that memorable day:
“We didn’t make any change because of external influences,” he says. “Those changes came up internally. We decided to remove that because we want the biggest possible number of people to play, and we don’t want to have something in the game that might make someone uncomfortable.”
The even better news is that those who were enraged that such an amazing act of censorship could occur have pretty much re-affirmed the point. After a month and a lot of publicity, the petition only gathered 6,300 signatures (and at least one duplicate I noticed). Most of these guys still don’t seem to believe that the developers actually decided on this change on their own…
and they’re probably all going to buy the game anyway:
I can’t imagine why the developers may choose to try to appeal to people outside of this demographic… oh wait, I can.
– wincenworks
Today’s throwback: reminder that “self-censorship” isn’t really a thing and maybe a developer doing the bare minimum to not alienate potential audience pre-release is neither “pandering to the SJWs” nor literally a vile act of censorship? ?
Thank you to icykitty for sharing the trauma of a set of armor that may actually be worse than the infamous outfit of Shahde from Prince of Persia.
– wincenworks
I like to think that the all-around badness of
this figure
kinda makes it an unintentional piece of commentary art. As if the designer/sculptor/company behind it was trying to say “You though you saw the worst of sexy female warriors? Nope, they could look like THIS!”.
Ah, sweet memories, of when I was cruising the internet for cursed content only part-time. : )
I was actually feeling optimistic lately about the state of miniatures nowadays. All the board games I play avoided this kind of low-effort designing for their lady characters. Were board game developers finally embracing the endless possibilities that not necessitating “Tiddy Out” provided??
But then I discovered that I actually living in a bubble and that a board game RPG got kickstarted in the year of our lord 2019 with this as a promised character/mini:
That’ll teach me to have barely-mid-tier standards!
A lot of people who view my feminist leanings as an “act” always point to the fact that I used to draw fetish art a decade ago as some sort of hypocrisy. But the fact of the matter is that just because I don’t draw fetish art anymore and identify as a feminist now doesn’t mean I have some sort of vendetta against it. The problem that arises when feminists clash with comic/game/geek content is because the “context” for the “sexy artwork” either doesn’t exist or is so flimsy it might as well not exist. There is nothing wrong with NSFW artwork, providing the context makes sense (and that includes the WHERE and HOW it’s being published).
Sidenote: I CANNOT recommend “Sunstone” enough to y’all. It’s amazing and you should check it out! Here’s the link to it on AMAZON.
PS: I genuinely don’t care that Quiet is a mute and can’t talk (that’s problematic in and of itself). I just wanted to make a point.
Huh, who knew there is a time and place to make female characters sexy and that time is not “always”?
Time for a reminder that this “sexy women just because” is such a norm that many seasoned creators still want to promote the idea that doing other than is somehow at odds with making a quality product.
Cliff Bleszinski recently got roasted for an Instagram post where he framed putting diversity into LawBreakers as a factor in its collapse, specifically because it did not get the praise that Overwatch did:
Ever since the studio closed I’ve been wracking my brain what I could have done differently. Pivot HARD when the juggernaut of Overwatch was announced. Been less nice with my design ideas and more of a dictator with them.
One big epiphany I had was that I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided.
Instead of the story being “this game looks neat” it became “this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms.” Instead of “these characters seem fun” it was “this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier.” Instead of “who am I going to choose” it became “white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews” instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.
It’s okay to be political when your company or studio is established for great product FIRST. But we were unproven and I regret doing it. (This will be quite the doozy of a chapter in the upcoming memoir.)
Now obviously there were the usual suspects chanting “Get Woke Go Broke” when the game closed, but largely (in places that are not boiling cesspits) it didn’t get a lot of discussion either way because of a wide variety of other, more pressing factors like gameplay, bugs, sever issues, graphical similarity to Overwatch, etc.
But the first thing that springs to mind is “I should have made the female characters sexier” because the conventional wisdom is somehow (despite society’s ongoing oppression of sex workers) female characters looking less than porny is a risky political statement.
and question why majority of the “Gaming Feminist” population cry and moan about “Bikini Armor” in World of Warcraft
But when it comes to representing a male character in cosplay they decide to strip it all down into a “Bikini Armor”… Contradiction at it’s best.
You want to look sexy… Go for it, But don’t point the finger at “sexist pigs”.
This is why I can’t take none of you social bloggers serious.
Now feel free to read between the lines and tell me about all the irrelevant crap I don’t need to read while you derail from the BASIC point I’m making here.
So… that “basic” point is “feminist who criticize stupid armor bikinis can not EVER want to look sexy or dress scantily out of their own free will”?
That’s why I have no trust for anyone who starts their statement with “I am going to play Devil’s Advocate”.
~Ozzie
After I finished laughing… which took a while. I decided I would go out looking for this army of social justice warriors in sexy Rule 63 Warcraft cosplay. Surely there must have been a legion of them to inspire such vitriol.
I found: One woman doing a single sexy WarCraft crossplay… and found no references to Social Justice, social justice issues or “sexist pigs” on any of their profiles (Indeed Google returns no results for their screen name + “sexist pigs”)
So not only did they miss the point – but this argument exists only in their imagination. That reminds me of something…
Post otherwise worth bringing back, because we’re never free of hilariously oversensitive dudebros crying HYPOCRISY at strawfeminist SJWs for somehow simultaneously hating bikini armor and… wanting to personally dress up as sexy male characters in said bikinis? Okay.
Which totally happens. With frequency… not.
And even if that did happen, we have a tags about agency and false equivalence which address such unfair comparisons. Have a good read!
